This pathetic excuse for a restaurant is located in a couple miles up Boulder Canyon outside of Boulder, Colorado. I thought that this would be a good place to take my Dad when he was out visiting for Thanksgiving. Wrong. We arrived at the restaurant at 6pm, only to find out that they had “lost” our reservation. No problem, right? Not so much… We waited for over 45 minutes while people that came after us were getting seated. Eventually we were seated at a table for two that was virtually in a hallway. No big deal – we were both starving and happy to be one step closer to our Thanksgiving turkey dinner. We receive our menus and hear about the specials, and are ready to put in our obvious Thanksgiving order when the waitress returns. Wait, what? The coke-whore who’s taking our order informs us that they have ran out of turkey and it’s 7pm. Awesome planning, you idiots. Since then, I’ve heard that this happens about every year from others that have this same experience. I guess that they find it strange that lots of people order turkey on Thanksgiving. It’s a really strange phenomenon that’s pretty hard to predict. So, the waitress gives us our menus back and tells us that they have lots of other dishes to choose from. Aside from being unhelpful, she’s being bitchy as hell, so I take myself downstairs to talk to the manager.

The manager decides that the best way to resolve this situation is to start accusing me of having unreasonable expectations of their restaurant instead of making even the smallest attempt to resolve the situation. I asked him if they’d be willing to extend the same price of the turkey special to any of the other dishes on the menu. He snaps at me, says no, and tells me he’s going to “see if there is enough in the kitchen for two more turkey plates.”

I go back to the table, and the waitress arrives shortly after with two of the driest plates of meat that I’ve ever seen. We both got a drumstick, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy and vegetables. The turkey was inedible, and had obviously been in the oven for about 3 hours too long. Upon informing the waitress of this, she tells me that it’s what I wanted so they won’t exchange it for anything else.

Back downstairs to talk to the manager… I talked to him about getting something else in place of the inedible food that we received. He gave us the same answer that he was unwilling to replace the food with another option. My dad and I finished what we could salvage from our plates and left.

I wrote the Red Lion a letter after this night, explaining my discontent. The letter was met with no apology, a lengthy explanation of why it is unfair to be upset about the lack of customer service, and a card good for one drink at their bar. As far as I’m concerned, they can take their drink card and shove it up their asses. I will never be back, and would caution anybody about eating there.

This is not the only time that I’ve been there. The customer service is consistently beyond poor, the food is overpriced and usually poorly cooked. The wait staff and management is rude and condescending. I know people that have worked there and they say that the place is ridden with sewage issues, that often flood the kitchen. The owners have a reputation of being drug addicts, so maybe none of this is surprising. Maybe they should stick to doing lines and leave the restaurant business to the ones that are good at it.